Legal Tech Startups Making Legal Solutions Accessible During COVID-19

LIZ startups are sharing resources, information, and access to their products and services to support consumers of legal services during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Normal isn’t what it used to be. Our offices are now intertwined with our living spaces, our only connections come from a screen standing between us, and some of our operations have become hazy amongst COVID-19.

We have all seen the intensity of COVID-19 and how our day to day has completely shifted. With lawyers and law firms transitioning to remote work, the startups in our space are sharing resources, information, and access to their products and services in hopes of helping consumers of legal services during these unprecedented times.

Below is a list of what each startup is making available to the community:

Alexsei: Alexsei is a web-based platform that provides a fast and affordable service for lawyers to get answers to their legal research questions and a user interface for lawyers to manage all their legal research data. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Alexsei is publishing a series of legal research memos and articles on the latest and most relevant COVID-19 related legal issues. Check them out here.

CiteRight: CiteRight lets litigators and legal researchers recycle their colleagues’ knowledge, experience, and successes. That lets them work faster and produce better work for their clients. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, CiteRight is making their product free for 2 months. You can get free access to their award-winning legal research collaboration platform that helps litigators and litigation support staff transition to working from home here.

epilogue: Epilogue is a web-based tool that guides individuals through the process of creating custom, legally-binding wills, powers of attorney, and other documents to cover incapacity and end-of-life planning. To support families and individuals during COVID-19, epilogue is offering 20% off all their services. Use promo code FAMILY20 at https://www.epiloguewills.com/.

Legalboards: Legalboards is a management system framework, designed to be tiny, precise and focused on individual legal practice areas. Legaboards is offering 90 days of free access to their product for up to 3 users at the same firm. Learn more here.

Loom Analytics: Court Analytics, Loom’s Canadian litigation intelligence web application, provides historical litigation trends, to assist lawyers in anticipating outcomes for their cases. You can look up outcomes, decision publication times, and damage quantum awards, by judge, counsel, facts, and more, to develop a winning strategy. For corporate counsel looking for lawyers with in-court experience, our Lawyer Search report provides you a quantitative list of litigation lawyers with qualified experience by practice area. Court Analytics is currently offering its subscription service for free for the next three months, under its Free for Three promotion. More details are available here.

MinuteBox: MinuteBox is a cloud-based entity management and minute book platform. There is nothing to install or maintain and data can be instantly migrated from a myriad of existing platforms – such as FastCo. MinuteBox is providing free migration for professionals that need access to their minute books and corporate records from home. The service also allows clients to access their minute books and entity data without service interruption. MinuteBox is waiving all fees until June 1, 2020. For more information, email info@minutebox.com or visit https://www.minutebox.com/business-continuity-and-support.html

OptimizeLegal: To help Canadian businesses and law firms stay up-to-date on quickly evolving legal changes due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Optimize Compliance is offering time-limited, free access to its compliance app. Optimize Compliance helps you build customized — cross-Canada – legal compliance reports that are updated in real-time. This offer is immediately available to HR, in-house legal and law firms with 10 or fewer lawyers. To sign up now, visit https://compliance.optimizelegal.com/login

Vaultie: Vaultie lets you and your clients digitally sign documents using verified IDs tied to compliance grade facial recognition. Clients can verify their IDs from anywhere and sign digital documents that are verifiable by any third party with access to a smartphone. They are a secure tool for virtual commissioning in Ontario. Vaultie has announced they will be offering their Standard plan for FREE during the COVID outbreak. Use the code WORKREMOTE2020 to get 2-months free access at https://vaultie.io

Visto: Visto is a free platform that helps international students and skilled workers immigrate to Canada. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Visto is creating weekly videos to review the most recent updates from the Canadian government on immigration, processing, and travel. These updates are also available on a live Google Doc that is updated on a weekly basis. You can watch the videos here and have access to the Google Doc here.

Thank you to these startups for stepping up and contributing to making legal services more accessible in a time where we need it most. For more information on our startups and other initiatives from the LIZ please click here.